


Kill it with Kindness

by loveinisolation



Category: Glee
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Headcanon, pet death, sort of, sort of cracky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-03
Updated: 2013-03-03
Packaged: 2017-12-04 03:42:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/706126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveinisolation/pseuds/loveinisolation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sebastian gets a pet fish and learns a hard lesson about how easy it is to get your heart broken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kill it with Kindness

**Author's Note:**

> This arose from a discussion with iaminarage about how Sebastian always needs some sort of traumatic past to make him end up the way he is, and the (joking) suggestion that maybe that childhood trauma was the death of his pet fish. It wouldn’t leave me alone, so here you go. Unbeta’d and slightly cracky. Warning for discussion of a pet dying.

 

Sebastian was 12 when he got a fish.

It was his first year boarding at school and even though he went home pretty much every weekend it was still lonely living in the dorms, especially since he really didn’t know anyone there. He joined the lacrosse team, because he was good at sports and at least it was something to do even if none of the other boys seemed particularly keen on getting to know him.

A few weeks into the school year Sebastian had gotten coerced into going along with the team to the Westerville fall fair under the pretense of group bonding – meant to make them a more cohesive unit and therefore stronger competitors – though really it had mostly been an excuse for them all to get off campus for an afternoon and enjoy the fall weather before it turned to bitter winter. So Sebastian had gone along even though he had no particular interest in the fair and was bound to end up wandering around alone. He had gone on a few rides and played a couple of the ubiquitous carnival games that never ever seemed to change regardless of how many years passed.

And then, by some insane miracle, Sebastian had won at one of those games that are nearly unwinnable and the gruff, tattooed man behind the booth had handed him a goldfish. It was kind of a pathetic looking thing; swimming lazy circles in the few inches of water afforded it by the plastic bag it was being kept in. Sebastian had squinted through the plastic and wrinkled his nose distastefully, but in the end the fish had been a living creature, and despite whatever cosmic mistake had placed it in Sebastian’s care he wasn’t about to just throw it away.

He hadn’t gone out of his way to do more than necessary; had bought a basic fish bowl and food and had gone through the process of acclimatizing the fish to the new water, and then mostly he had ignored it.

Except for how he hadn’t.

Because Sebastian didn’t have a whole lot of people, especially at his new school, who he considered good friends and so more often than not he would find himself venting his frustrations to the unresponsive, orange and white speckled fish. Not once had it answered or given him advice, but somehow it made Sebastian feel better simply saying things out loud to a living creature that, presumably, could actually hear him.

And then, somehow, Sebastian had become attached. The fish that he hadn’t even bothered to name when he first brought it home was suddenly an actual pet – the kind that you love and care for and want around forever.

It had started with a name, Ghoti, (and ok, so it was only funny on paper, but he’d gotten used to calling the damn thing “fish”) and then one day Sebastian had decided that maybe, just maybe, the bowl looked a little empty and uninviting with just some blue gravel and one perfunctory plastic plant. So he’d trekked out to the pet store near the mall one weekend and he’d spent an hour wandering around before picking out a second plant and a little sunken wreck of a convertible simply because it felt a little less typical than the standard sunken ships, and it wasn’t like Ghoti would know the difference anyway.

He’d spent Sunday night carefully washing and preparing the new additions to Ghoti’s home, following the instructions to the best of his ability and babbling excitedly to the little fish as he tried to create a welcoming living environment for it.

Sebastian had taken care getting the placement of the new decorations just right, shifting them in circles around the limited space of the fish bowl until it had looked the way he wanted it to. Smiling to himself, he had gently released his little fishy friend back into the bowl and watched as he swam around amongst the green plastic plants and down to the little car. In fact, Sebastian hadn’t done much other than watch Ghoti for the rest of the evening, a grin on his face at how happy the little fish looked in his newly decorated bowl.

The next morning Sebastian had woken with a smile still on his face and he’d bounced out of bed to go feed his pet. He grabbed a pinch of fish food and slowly sprinkled it over the water and only then, when the fish hadn’t moved immediately to eat, had Sebastian realized that something was wrong. Ghoti, usually lethargic at the best of times, was motionless at the bottom the bowl.

Sebastian tapped on the glass, trying to entice the fish to move and growing more panicked with every moment that it didn’t. He’d kept trying, tapping frantically on the bowl until the food he’d sprinkled had grown soggy and slowly fallen towards the bottom, seeming to cover the little world with a kind of funeral shroud.

It had been the first time that Sebastian had experienced the death of something that he cared for. The first time it had really hit home how much loving something could hurt, and how muchhe could hurt something by loving it. He’d been trying to create a happy home for his pet and instead, at 12, he had learned that loving something could kill it. Had learned that how possible it was that by opening his heart it would just end up broken.

So he hardened himself just a little bit. He hid his heart away and steeled himself against emotion, had kept the world at arm’s length with barbed words because in the end it was easier to pretend he didn’t care than it was to let something in and learn to love it only to end up killing it with kindness.

**Author's Note:**

> If you don’t know what the name means, check out this wiki post: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti


End file.
